This year's lecturer is Professor Dr Wolfgang Schön of Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance (Germany).

His topic is the Distinct Equity of the Debt-Equity Distinction.

As part of this event The Hon Justice RF Edmonds, Federal Court of Australia will launch a special anniversary edition of Ross Parson's seminal publication, Income and Taxation in Australia.

The evening concludes with a cocktail function generously sponsored by Thomson Reuters

2011 Ross Parsons Address in Taxation Law

Professor Dr Wolfgang Schön

Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance, Germany

Economists and lawyers around the world regard the different tax treatment of debt and equity as a major reason for inefficient and inequitable taxation of cross-border finance. Moreover, the increasing "hybridization" of financial instruments apparently renders the traditional divide between bondholders and shareholders more and more meaningless. Proposals for uniform treatment of debt and equity instruments (seen for example in the ACE proposal from the UK and the CBIT proposal from the US, both considered by the Henry review) are on the rise.

Against this background, the lecture will address the relevant features of the debt/equity divide in corporate law and finance, consider the teleology of this distinction in the context of income taxation, corporate tax, and international tax allocation. The lecture will try to present a fresh view on the underlying policy choices.

Director, Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance, Department of Business and Tax Law, Munich; Vice President of the Max Planck Society; Honorary Professor for Civil Law, Corporate Law and Tax Law, Munich University.

Professor Schön was the David Tillinghast Lecturer at NYU in 2004; Anton Philips Professor, Tilburg University in 2004/05. He is currently International Research Fellow, Oxford University Center for Business Taxation since 2006; Vice-Chair of the Permanent Scientific Committee of the International Fiscal Association since 2008; Visiting Professor, NYULaw School 2009 and 2011; Honorary Doctorate, Université Catholique de Louvain 2009; Co-Editor, World Tax Journal since 2009;

Member of the Academia Europaea and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences.

Book Launch

The Hon. Justice RF Edmonds, Federal Court of Australia

RW Parsons, Income Taxation in Australia: Principles of Income, Deductibility and Tax Accounting

Facsimile edition of the original 1985 publication

2011 marks the 50th anniversary of Ross Parsons' appointment as a Professor at Sydney Law School, and the 25th anniversary of his retirement. It is also 26 years since the publication of Ross Parsons' authoritative work, Income Taxation in Australia: Principles of Income, Deductibility and Tax Accounting. Those 26 years have cemented its reputation as the leading work on 'the common law' of Australian income tax. The careful reasoning, depth of analysis and the astute insights it contains are still unmatched.

Sydney Law School and Thomson Reuters are marking this occasion by re-publishing Ross' original book, supplemented by two additional papers written after his retirement- on the High Court decisions in Myer & John, and on the Roberts & Smith judgment.

Justice Edmonds is one of Australia's leading tax jurists. He was appointed to the Federal Court in May 2005 from the New South Wales Bar. He was called to the Bar in 1985 and was appointed Senior Counsel in 1995. In his practice at the Bar, he appeared in many of the leading tax cases of the last 25 years, including Orica, Hart, Consolidated Press Holdings, Firth, Prestige Motors, Allina, Westfield and Mercantile Credits. As a judge of the Federal Court he has delivered leading judgments in some of the most significant recent cases - including RCI, Ashwick (Qld), Virgin Holdings and Deutsche Asia Pacific Finance- and has been at the forefront of developing the jurisprudence in some of the new areas of Australian tax law such as the GST (Reliance Carpet, South SteyneHotel and QANTAS) and the corporate consolidation system (Hastie Group).

He graduated from the University of Sydney with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) and Master of Laws (LLM).